Should we read a play?

Last week I went to see Hamlet at the National Theatre - a powerful modern dress production with Rory Kinnear in tremendous form as a sensitive, intelligent Hamlet whose loneliness and desperation, caught in the surveillance society at Elsinore, are sometimes hard to observe.  I think it is the third time I have seen Hamlet and on each occasion, I leave wishing that I had studied it at school or even read it in advance.  And of course, I didn't have the self-discipline this time to get around to reading it, which is frustrating as it is littered with familiar phrases and idioms which are part of our everyday language.  I'm also sure that some study of the famous soliloquies would allow me better to appreciate and understand Hamlet's turmoil.

The trouble with Hamlet is that it is very long (I believe it is 4 hours uncut and so by some distance, Shakespeare's longest play).  That doesn't lend itself to a quick read on the tube on the way into the theatre.  As a group we rarely read plays; and I always find them harder than I expect when I do. I think this maybe because a different approach to reading is required, perhaps you have to read more sensitively and with greater attention to the language than you can sometimes get away with when reading a novel.  I read The Glass Menagerie in November (only after seeing the production at the Young Vic) and found it much harder work than I thought it would be - and this despite the huge detail and narrative as to stage directions provided by Tennessee Williams.  But it was a valuable exercise as it enabled me to reflect on what I felt about some of the characters in the play, one of whom I had seriously misjudged, and also to mull over some of the themes in the play with rather more consideration than I had done at the theatre.

Our group has read a play in the past but, I think, just the one; before my records began, we read Translations by Brian Friel.  I can't recall why (possibly because of its Irishness), but I do remember that it was an enjoyable exercise. Perhaps we should try again.